Mild Amusement

The Mild Wife and I make spreadsheets. It's just one of those things that we do. There was a time when I probably would've contested whether this was true, but as time has gone on and more spreadsheets have "magically" appeared in our lives, it's become harder and harder to dispute. I mean, we were talking about a wish list, and a spreadsheet popped out . The most obvious place where this comes up, though, is with our monthly budget . I mean, we're literally talking about trying to make sure numbers match up. Even if I didn't love spreadsheets quite as much, this would be one scenario where it'd just make sense to use this particular tool. There are lots of numbers to track, and we want to keep an eye on how much we're spending. This seems like a classic case for a spreadsheet. Well, given how prevalent they are in our lives, this also means that I've gotten used to seeing some of the numbers. In very simplified terms, I track monthly payments ...

Lately, the Mild Wife and I have been trying to be better about budgeting. Luckily for us, there's no impending costs that forced this on us, nor are we struggling to make payments. We just want to save up for big costs faster. Since it's not likely that we're going to win the lottery any time soon (it's particularly hard when you don't purchase tickets), we figured we're try to be more efficient about the money that we already make. Basically, try to put money more towards the savings categories than the spending ones. It's worth noting that we're not really doing anything fancy in order to try to shift our habits. We didn't subscribe to new alerts on every credit card and bank account, we didn't hire a financial advisor, nor did we invent a new algorithm for how to put money away. We just started by tracking what we spend. Basically, we decided that we had categories, and we were allowed to spend a certain amount in each category. We have a...